


End of a Day

by bunnoculars



Category: SHINee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 11:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13926450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: Jonghyun gets through his day, thinking of Taemin.





	End of a Day

The sun is rising when he pulls out into the street. He’s left early enough that there’s no traffic, and like always, his drive is the one part of the day where Seoul is alone with him.

Except Jonghyun is cheating on it today.

It hurts to sit. He can’t get comfortable, shifting around behind the wheel, but the pain just shifts with him, and maybe he’s okay with that. Maybe he likes it. He still feels so raw and open, and he doesn’t know what his body is saying, if he needs Taemin inside him again, or if Taemin still is somehow. He likes both options, he’ll take both.

He gets to work too fast.

He’s recording the studio version of another song from The Man Who Composes today, but he won’t decide what that means until next time, probably months away. If he fights for the next song and wins and gets to bring it in here in the end, then today becomes something.

It goes something like this: The company doesn’t want to spend money on the album he wants to make. Jonghyun doesn’t want to waste his time on shit he doesn’t want to do anymore. It’s a problem. So far he thinks they’re just letting him win, but with each song he still has to work so hard to get them to yes. He hates both sides of that.

His first take sucks. His second one is a little better, and then he wakes up, and the producer stops giving him direction.

Jonghyun isn’t feeling it. He’s good enough that he doesn’t need to, his voice does what he wants it to. Still, this is his song. His baby. He needs to put himself into it, or forget the next song, and fuck his album, because he won’t end up with anything he wants, anyway.

The worst part is that Jonghyun is making this harder on himself than it has to be, because he always does.

That, and it’s so hot in here. It always is in the early spring, when the heating system overstays its welcome.

He wrestles his hoodie off, and finds out that he’s wearing Taemin’s T-shirt. He got dressed in the dark. By the time Taemin got up, it would have been light out. He’d have known when he put on Jonghyun’s shirt. Maybe he hasn't gone home to change, maybe he’ll wear it all day.

The other thing is, Taemin’s shirt smells like Taemin. 

Jonghyun’s never tried to come up with excuses to sniff himself before, and somehow this is so much trickier than checking for BO. He feels so obvious, so crazy, wiping his face for sweat that doesn’t exist and adjusting his collar, attempting to do his job at the same time.

“Let’s take it from the top, Jonghyun-ssi,” the engineer says into the microphone once more.

Jonghyun breathes Taemin in as deeply as his lungs will let him, and then tells himself to stop fucking around. He can do this. He’ll get it right today. He just needs to try harder. 

He flays his vocal cords until two, when the junior staffers bundle into the anteroom with bags and bags of takeout. Lunch.

This time when he sits down, the pain revisits him, but it’s like his body has caught up to him, too. Like it’s found a convenient place to stop, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to make it get up again.

He hasn’t been sleeping lately. If he had to guess, maybe three or four hours out of the past forty-eight. He could live without almost everything he’s gone through in that time, but last night is different. Last night had to happen. It’s the only reason he was able to get into his car and come here and do this. It’s the only thing keeping him sane.

Who is he kidding. But if he’s insane, he likes it that way. He likes that even the tiniest details he can remember have his heart hammering in his chest right now. And now he can’t eat. His palms are even sweating. 

He can’t even lie to himself about trying to nap, either, because if he closes his eyes, he’ll see what he did to Taemin’s face, hear all the little sounds he got out of him, and there’s only one way it’ll end, pants around his ankles in the handicapped stall, dick in his hand, fist in his mouth.

He has things he has to do today.

It’s already dangerous, so he abandons his food, forces himself up and goes outside to stand around in Taemin’s T-shirt and feel stupid, waiting for his body to cool down when it’s almost sixty degrees. He kind of wishes he weren’t trying to quit smoking.

His day goes on. It would have with or without him, but he’s really trying here. He’s already been at this for too long without getting the song down, knows his voice and knows himself enough to accept that any more work on it is useless, but it’s okay. He’ll just get as close as he can to the real thing today, and book more studio time. SM will let him do that much without fuss.

By the time he finishes at ten, his phone is the only thing left in his head. He makes himself go out to his car first, and then he lingers some more in the dark, not sure how to deal with the stupid, unpoppable bubbles in his chest.

His phone almost blinds him when he finally turns it on. He blinks the spots away and feels it rumble in his hand, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That’s it.

He finds a way to hint to two friends that he’s busy tonight, even though no one was really asking him and they’re both unhappily single and Jonghyun is being uncool. Happiness makes him so uncool.

He ignores everyone else, and starts the engine. No Taemin. He should’ve known better. Taemin doesn’t do phones with people he sees every day, he was born in the wrong century. 

Whatever. Jonghyun likes being one of those people that Taemin sees every day. He wants to be the only one, sometimes, but he can share Taemin with his family and the rest of the members. And anyway, he’s the one Taemin is going to see tonight, and tonight, it’ll be special. Tonight Taemin is his date.

Jonghyun doesn’t have anything planned. It’s not like that, they’re just going for a walk by the river. But still. He’s going to see Taemin in four and a half hours. He won’t be able to kiss him hello, but Taemin will know that he wants to. He’ll want it, too. And maybe Jonghyun will put his arm around Taemin’s shoulders and draw him in against him, feel Taemin’s breath and movement with his own body, or maybe he’ll hold his hand and pull it into his own pocket and play with Taemin’s fingers. And they’ll walk together and look at the moon in the sky and the moon in the river, and then Jonghyun will take him home and try everything he can to make Taemin tell him what he wants.

He can sleep some other time. Any other time.

And in the meantime, he has a radio show.

“Nice,” Nine says when she sees him, but she’s not even looking him in the face. She’s looking at the hickey on his neck. 

She’s probably not the first person to have noticed it today, but she is the first person who’s not pretending she hasn’t. It makes Jonghyun feel so normal all of the sudden. It makes Jonghyun want to tell her everything, whatever she hasn’t guessed already. Maybe he just wants an excuse to say some things out loud.

Jonghyun is not going to think about it now. 

He spends two whole hours not thinking about it.

“Are you busy after this, do you want to get a drink?” Nine asks him while the staff bustles around them, collecting scripts and packing up equipment.

“I have somewhere to be,” Jonghyun says, and realizes he’s smiling.

“Ooooooh~” Nine reads into it like he wants her to, shaking her hair out of her eyes and smirking at him. “Your forever solo thing was all an act, you might as well admit it.”

He won’t admit anything in the end. This is all too new, and if he says something to anyone but Taemin, it might not even sound real yet, and he doesn’t think he can take that. And he’s not even sure Taemin wants to tell anyone outside the two of them. 

He sticks around until the staff shoos him out the door, says good night, says see you tomorrow, and Jonghyun doesn’t want to care about that right now. The whole tomorrow thing.

Car again. No traffic again. All he hopes now is that Taemin didn’t forget. Whenever Jonghyun really, really needs him to remember stuff, he usually does, but this is different. It’s more like, he hopes Taemin couldn’t forget.

He’s there in almost no time. And then Jonghyun sees him again.

Taemin is just standing around where he said he would be, under the tree with the crooked trunk, next to the trash can with the mangled English graffiti Taemin didn’t even know to make fun of the last time they were here. His pale hair is tangled under his baseball cap. Yesterday he had a gigantic whitehead on his left cheek that was seriously freaking him out, today he has a bloody scab that’s going to get him in trouble at work. His clothes are mismatched and tatty and ill fitting, because he’s never learned how to dress himself. He looks as tired as Jonghyun feels.

Jonghyun has never seen anything so beautiful in his whole life. His knees go weak, Taemin is so beautiful. He wants to kiss Taemin so badly, Jonghyun doesn’t know how he’s holding back.

Looking at Taemin waiting for him like this, looking at the smile that breaks across his face when he sees Jonghyun, Jonghyun’s shitty day is less than nothing.

Still, he’s going to tell Taemin all about it. He won't leave the dirty parts out. Maybe he’ll tell him about it just to see how Taemin takes it when Jonghyun lets him know he’s been thinking about him all day. How easily he’ll admit that he’s been thinking of Jonghyun, too.

And when he gets up tomorrow, he’s going to think about this part of the day first. He knows he’ll do anything to get back here again.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is set in ~spring 2015, even though I am totally ignorant about the recording process behind Story Op 1 lol.


End file.
